


... Put on that Hotel California...

by Fangirlingmanaged



Series: God Knows I... [7]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Homophobic Language, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Hurt Steve, M/M, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Protective Clint, Steve Feels, Steve Needs a Hug, Tony's fucked up childhood, almost break-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 21:14:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5348756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fangirlingmanaged/pseuds/Fangirlingmanaged
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint can't let the SHRA keep hurting people. That's the only reason he sides with Steve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	... Put on that Hotel California...

**Author's Note:**

> A few things:  
> 1\. I'm back merely because i wrote 2 essays for school and this was my reward, and yours as well, I suppose.   
> 2\. I basically said, fuck Age of Ultron and made my own headcanon. You're welcome LOL   
> Anyways! Enjoy!

Clint doesn’t side with Tony because of two very important things. Or, well, two very important people. Pietro and Wanda. He doesn’t even want to think about what could have been done to the two kids if Cap hadn’t decided to give them a chance to redeem themselves and join the team. Well, Wanda at least seeing as Pietro was still recovering.

Wait, shit no, Clint isn’t supposed to know about that. He wants to roll his eyes every time he thinks about the fact that Phil had tried to keep that from him. As if you could hide something so important from your damn partner. Though he supposes he’s on the fence with that one after the whole “Let’s pretend I have a wife to get all these assholes settled down” fiasco that they had created. Laura was, in fact, the mother of the children they had met. She just wasn’t really Clint’s wife, though she’d been a true sport about the whole thing. Unfortunately, her house had been the only safe house on location that would serve for the time being, and the kids liked him anyway. Had started to call him Dad instead of Clint after Jerome’s passing, too. It was a thing with him, he thinks as he looks into Barnes containment room, to pick up strays.

He’d been able to take over as Wanda and Pietro’s guardian thanks to Cap, and for that he will forever be indebted to him. Which is why he’s standing here, with a half-crazed super soldier with a crazy metal arm contained in a room meant for the Hulk, and about to go in completely unprotected in the hopes of bringing him back.

It had taken Clint, Sam, and Thor to take the sergeant to the containment room after his run-in with Rhodes in the communal floor. They’d both been pumped up on adrenaline and protectiveness for their respective best friends that they had seen red. Well, Rhodey had seen red at seeing Barnes walking around so freely and had decided to take matters into his own hands. Forgetting, in his blinding papa bear mode rage, that he couldn’t call the suit on command and that he was still recovering from the beat down he’d taken. Honestly, the man spends a week in medical and still thinks he can take on brainwashed super soldier. Clint lives with a bunch of fucking psychos. Anyway, Buck had snapped out of his depression for his best friend and had jumped right into super soldier mode. Clint thinks it was justified, in a way, how he had reacted to Rhodey. He was in a clearly hostile environment, hell Clint could feel the hatred, and he was incredibly vulnerable. Anyway, Bucky had lunged back at Rhodes and they had gone tumbling over the coffee table in the communal floor. Clint’s yell of Bucky must have been loud enough, he wouldn’t know he didn’t have his aids in at the time, because Sam and Thor had come running from the kitchen.

Clint had stayed on the floor with Rhodes trying to get him back on his feet, blood was pouring from his nose and mouth and a very impressive bump was forming on his head, while Sam and Thor tried to calm him down. Bucky kept snarling like a cornered animal, Clint could see even Thor struggling to get him to calm down, while his eyes never left Rhodes’s prone body on the floor. His hair was flipping over his eyes, and Clint was hit again with how fast he could go from Bucky to Winter Soldier. Seeing that Rhodey was fine, Clint told the others to take Bucky to Hulk’s containment room until he broke away from the nightmare. Rhodey tried to follow them, but they were already gone.

“I think you’ve done enough, man,” Clint told him sharply. He might not know Bucky well, but he still didn’t want to see him hurt. That lost look in the soldier’s eyes… it brought painful, haunting memories of Clint’s time under Loki. He understood that pain all too well.

“Fuck you, Barton,” Rhodes spat at him. Clint reared back in shock, a small part of him was hurt by the venom in his voice, but he steeled himself for it. _It was for the kids_ , Clint repeats to himself, _the SHRA would have destroyed them. Destroyed whatever trust Wanda had been building for them._ “I don’t even know why you’re still here,” his breath hitched as he placed his hand over his rib, “your new friend needs you.”

“You were never my friend, Rhodes,” Clint tells him. He wants to fiddle with his aids, make it so he doesn’t have to hear what the other man is saying, but that would be the coward’s way out. He’d told Steve, back when the loyalties had been divided, that he would take the fallout if it meant keeping those two kids safe. He’d meant it.

“Never said I was,” Rhodes says. He grunts as he gets to his feet. “But I’m pretty sure Tony called you his brother at some, and we see how that turned out.”

Clint looks at him for a moment, lets that blow set in right between his ribs, before he shakes his head and walks to the door. There’s hurt and anger warring inside of him because _fuck!_ He knows they fucked up big time, but they thought they were doing the same thing. Had wanted to spare innocent lives that should never have been put in danger, mutant or not. He’s worked himself enough to give Rhodes a parting blow of his own.

“Pretty sure Tony had been calling Steve his lover, too, right before he went out with that chick to the gala. It seems we all say shit that we don’t mean,” and I’m the biggest asshole hypocrite of all, he thinks. Because he knows that what Tony had done then was just… stupidly in character, and self-sacrificing.

                                                                                          ***

Things had been sort of strained at the tower for a while after the Ultron debacle, and not only because Tony had inadvertently created an army of murdering robots. It was more to do with the two of them, their dynamic, after they had all lived together in the New Avengers mansion again. After the blissful honeymoon phase after Tony’s latest near-death experience, something had happened between the two of them. It all sort of came to a head one day in the kitchen, and it had kind of been Clint’s fault.

“Hey, Repulsor ass,” he’d greeted Tony as he walked towards the coffee maker. The genius had rolled his eyes, and his lips had moved, but Clint hadn’t put his aids in yet so he didn’t hear what he said. It was either Katniss or gotta piss, Clint was too groggy to really know, but the thing is he had taken the carafe away. Clint had put his aids in, and had turned to the rest of the group gathered in the kitchen. The others at the table, Steve and Natasha and a secretly amused Wanda, had chuckled at their interaction. “Gimme the coffee.”

“Like hell, I made this, Legolas,” Tony replied as he sat with his short stack of pancakes next to Natasha. She quirked an eyebrow and shot a quick look at Steve, but the soldier was shoveling food into his mouth and avoiding conversation.

“I think you’re being a cannibal right now,” Clint said with a smirk. The best way to get shit from Tony was to whiplash his brain from one nonsensical topic to the next so that he lost track of what was around him. It worked this time, his fork paused halfway to his mouth, and he did that confused puppy head tilt that always got Steve.

“The hell are you talking about?”

Clint’s smirk grew bigger. “You’re a short stack eating a short stack!” the split second where Tony looked at him as if he was deciding whether to stab him with the fork or throw him out the window was enough for Clint to commandeer the carafe.

“I fucking hate when he does that,” Tony grumbled as he took a big bite of the pancakes on his plate. They were drowning in syrup, it was disgusting, which is why Clint mimicked him and made a pool of syrup on his too. Natasha wrinkled her nose at him, and he grinned.

“Hey, where’s Pepper anyway?” The air suddenly got really chilly in the kitchen.

“At HQ, I’m assuming,” Tony told him stiffly. He resolutely stared at his pancakes.

“Yeah, but…” Natasha elbowed him, but he blundered on. “Why isn’t she here getting you ready? You have that gala thing, right? I thought she’d be here to make sure Steve didn’t let you slack off and then you’d both be late?” Steve chanced a quick glance at Tony, but the other man was glaring at Clint. He honestly didn’t know what was so wrong with asking about their plans. “What?”

“ _Christ, Clint…”_ Natasha had hissed at him. Her worried eyes went from Steve to Tony and back to Clint.

“I, um, I’m not going to be there tonight,” Steve said quietly. His eyes kept glancing at Tony, but dropped when he noticed the other man’s indifference.

“It’s not an Avengers event,” Tony says stiffly. He gulps at his orange juice, and itches at the reactor.

“Yeah, but he’s your boy—“Tony’s chair makes a horrible crashing noise as he pushes back from the table violently. His eyes, quite simply, tell Clint that he needs to shut his mouth. He glares one more time, turns as if to look at Steve, and then all but runs out of the kitchen. Natasha and Wanda swear in Russian, and Steve takes deep calming breaths that rattle in his chest.

“Steve—“Natasha starts.

“It’s fine,” he says quietly, brokenly. He looks up at them, and attempts a smile. It’s the saddest fucking thing Clint has ever seen. “He—he already has a d-date. Partner. Um, a guest. He said. That. So, um” his eyes look suspiciously glittery. “I’ll be in the gym,” he tells them quietly and then gets out of the kitchen as if he’d been burned.

“Okay, what the fuck was that?” he asks the women. Because that? That sounded a lot like Tony was fucking ashamed of Steve, which is like what the fuck? Who the hell would be ashamed of Captain America? The man probably shit like actual rainbows and glittery.

“Stark is ashamed of him,” Wanda says bitterly. She’s never been a big fan of Tony; too many lies and suspicious actions that had no explanation and somehow linked to Tony for her to trust him. She was getting better or at least was, Clint thinks wryly, as she stabs at a cube of fruit with her fork.

“C’mon, kid, that’s not—“

“She’s not wrong,” Nat tells him with a frown. She’s honestly worried about them, he notes, which means this is actually serious. Whatever the hell just happened has been going on for a while. Maybe they had just been really good at hiding it. “At least, not completely. Stark’s… reluctant to be seen with Steve outside of the tower. From what he’s said, they’ve been in a relationship since almost after the Battle of New York that he insisted Steve hid from everyone.”

“You can’t possibly mean he’s a fucking closet homophobe, Nat. Seriously? Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist Tony, a self-hating homophobe?” The idea seemed so beyond reach for Clint until he’d been sneaking in the vents later that afternoon.

“We don’t have time for this right now, Steve,” Tony had been saying as he stood in front of the mirror. He was tugging aggressively at his bow tie, and Steve sighed and moved to help him. Tony stood very still as the bigger man tried to fix his tie.

“You and your _guest_ don’t have time for me, you mean,” Steve had said very quietly, his eyes never leaving the silk between his fingers. Tony’s hand snapped up to grab his wrist, but quickly let go when Steve flinched.

“Don’t,” the shorter man had told him sternly. His head was tilted back to look at the soldier, but Clint couldn’t see his eyes. “You know that’s not—“

“Then what is it like Tony?” Steve snapped, tightening the bow tie a bit too much if Tony’s tugging after was any indication. He took three steps away from the shorter man and carded his fingers through his hair. They made an odd, disturbingly mismatched couple then. Tony dressed to perfection while Steve stood barefoot and on threadbare lounge pants. “Tell what it means that I’m staying here, probably will have to watch on the fucking television and feel like—“He snapped his mouth shut.

“Feel like what?”  Tony asked quietly. Steve merely looked at him for a while longer, shook his head, and then walked towards the door. “Feel like what, Steve?” Tony followed, but Steve didn’t turn back.

“Just do me a favor, and remember one thing, Tony,” Steve said quietly. He was hunched in on himself, staring out into the hall. “I was beat up every single day because people thought that ‘cause I was small I was bound to be a fuckin’ fairy,” Clint’s breath hitched and he saw Tony rear back as if he had been slapped. “I’m the one that got called all sorts of names by everyone I knew, and I can still love you like I do. Still not be ashamed about a damned thing we done together. I can take a lot of shit, Tony, but…”

“But what?” Tony asked him softly. Clint could see how tense his back was and how his hands kept fisting.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this. People could call me all sorts of things, but it’d be worth it if at least I was sure I had you.” With that, he’d walked out. Had left Tony to fall back on his bed, and drop his head in his hands and let his shoulders quake.

“None of them were your father,” Tony said quietly, so quietly Clint almost didn’t catch it as he turned on the vents. “And you have, by God Steve, you’ll always have me.”

The confrontation hadn’t stopped Tony from going to the gala, or get ragingly drunk. Though to his credit, every time he was on camera he was subdued; just kept knocking back glass after glass. He’d stumbled into the dark facility right as Clint had gotten up for snack. Had almost tripped on his own damned feet, and would have face planted if the archer hadn’t caught him.

“’teve?” Tony patted his chest, and sighed. “Not m’teve.”

“He’s asleep,” Clint told him. He was honestly out of his depth here, he’d never seen Tony this shit faced drunk before. “C’mon, let’s get you back to bed.”

“Can’t” Tony said wretchedly. He kept blinking at the room around them as if he didn’t know where he was or how he got there. Clint had his suspicions as to why, but he didn’t smell like perfume and he sure as hell didn’t look like someone who had recently had a tumble in the sheets. Clint would know, Phil was just down the hall at that very minute.

“Yes, you can. Come on,” he tried to get Tony in the general direction of his room, but the genius yanked his arm away from Clint’s grip. He miscalculated the force necessary for such a thing because he tumbled right back on his ass.

“No, I can’t!” he yelled at the archer. He was trying to glare at him, but his glare ended up somewhere to the right of Clint’s shoulder. “He don’t wan’ me nomo’h. Lost ‘im too, ‘cause o’ fuckin’ ‘Oward. ‘Can’t have no fairy fo’ a son, Ant’ny. Won’ ‘ave no sissy fo’ an hei’, Ant’ny. Cap’n ‘Merica ain’ proud o’ no limp’” he’d hiccupped, and then kept speaking in much too loud a voice for the stillness of the late hour. “’wris’ed poof like yoo’ well joke’s on ‘im right? Right, ‘int? Joke’s on ‘im cause Cap’n ‘Merica loves me.” He seemed to remember something because he grew morose, and his breath hitched. “Lov’d me. Pro’ly won’ even look ah me ‘nymo’ nah. ‘Oward took ‘im too.”

Clint was about to open his mouth to respond when he noticed who was standing on the door. Clint had always know that Cap was the most sincere and emotionally in tuned person on the team, but he’d never seen him this emotional. It was the very first time he’d seen Cap cry. “I got it,” he’d told Clint roughly and had lifted his boyfriend clear off the floor in one swoop.

“’teve,” Tony sighed. “’m so’ry.”

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” Clint heard him say as he walked out of the kitchen without sparing him another glance. His voice faded as he went down the hall. “Not your fault, I know now.”

                                                                                                     ***

Things had gotten better after that. Not by much, and certainly not all at once, but they were improving. There were times when Tony would freeze up and would expect a harsh word from someone, but they would help him. Talk him out of whatever awful memory his father had left. They’d gone as far as going together at galas from then on. To the last two, Tony had firmly held Steve’s hand throughout the whole walk up the carpet. They have the pictures to prove it, taken off the Tower’s wall and put at the New Avengers facility, and it’s hard to figure out what’s shining more. The lights, the camera flashes, or the stupidly happy grins on both their face.

A thump on the reinforced crystal snaps Clint back to attention. Barnes seems to be losing steam, if the huddled way he’s turning in circles is any indication. He can’t see them, but they can see him. It’s a thing for the Hulk, if he doesn’t see the threat then he begins to calm down. Rather than calming down, Barnes seems to be going from mindless killer to terrified prey. His eyes are unfocused and he curls up on himself at one corner.

“How the fuck are we supposed to help him, Phil?” Clint asks his partner thickly. There is no protocol to follow for Barnes.

“Like we did with Steve,” Phil responds.

“What, let him loose in the middle of twenty-fifteen New York?” Clint snorts derisively, but he refuses to accept that there is no way to help the other man. Bucky was… he was good. He was loyal and funny and just _good_ , but he had been buried deep into the Winter Soldier mutt HYDRA had created.

“Very funny, Barton,” Phil tries to sound stern, but Clint can detect the fondly exasperated tone to his voice. He grins. “I meant, what we were supposed to do with Steve. Give him information, test his limits. Expose him to people and things gradually. He seems to be doing okay with the team.”

“He attacked Rhodey,” it burns Clint’s throat to say it.

“Because the colonel went after him first. Clint,” the other man taps his arm. Their eyes meet, and Clint reads everything that the other man isn’t saying out loud. “He’s been brainwashed, and he’ll have a serious cause of PTSD, but he’s still himself. He’s still Barnes, the same kid that went into war for Steve all those years go. He’s gonna come back.”

“Fine,” Clint says as he moves to the door. He squares his shoulders and nods at Phil. “Let's get him back so he can be there for Cap."

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! Tony needed to be more dimensional. He can't be the victim all the time.   
> Honestly, guys, I can't keep hating on my Steeeeeeeb


End file.
